Horace Walpole is known to literary scholars as the founder of a significant literary genre, the gothic novel, which he initiated with the publication of The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto (1764). Historians of the eighteenth century know him as a diarist and letter writer; art historians recognize him as a promoter of the Gothic in architecture; and students of publishing history and the history of the book know him as a book collector and a publisher.

Horatio Walpole was born 24 September 1717 (O.S.) at 17 Arlington Street, London. His parents were Sir Robert Walpole, later first Earl of Orford, and Catherine Shorter, daughter of John Shorter of Bybrook, Kent. Walpole was born into a famous political dynasty; his father served in Parliament and in the cabinet with distinction...